U.S. News: The church of the almighty white man (7/19/99)





http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/990719/whites.htm



The Church of the Almighty White Man



A nasty new strain of supremacy emerges



BY ANGIE CANNON AND WARREN COHEN



Matthew Hale is a would-be lawyer who plays the violin at weddings and reads philosophy. He's 27 and lives with his dad, a retired cop, in a small, modest home in East Peoria, Ill. A typical middle-American family? Hardly. The Israeli-flag doormat is the first giveaway.



It is here -- in a second-floor study plastered with swastikas -- that Hale refers to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians as "mud people." It is here in this bright, red room that Hale utters a perverse rallying cry: RAHOWA! -- shorthand for Racial Holy War -- and where he runs the World Church of the Creator, one of the most sophisticated, fastest-growing white supremacist groups in a movement whose virulence is rising nationally.



Violent links. The World Church of the Creator, which doesn't believe in God but regards white people as the original creators, is the group that Benjamin N. Smith joined about a year before he went on a rampage over the Fourth of July weekend, shooting blacks, Jews, and Asians in Indiana and Illinois, killing two people and wounding nine. Smith apparently killed himself during a police chase. The investigation of the shooting is continuing. Hale says his group has never incited violence. Even before the shootings, the group and its predecessor, Church of the Creator, had an ugly past. The original church was founded in 1973 by Ben Klassen, a former Florida legislator who invented the electric can opener and ultimately killed himself in 1993. Some members have been linked to the 1991 murder of a black gulf war veteran in Florida, a plot to assassinate black and Jewish leaders, and other hate crimes.



Hale revived the group in 1996, combining a crafty sense of First Amendment protections, the instincts of a religious cult leader, and a willingness to fence with the media. Last week he was happy to talk to a U.S. News reporter about the roots of his racism, which he said came from reading the encyclopedia when he was 12 and concluding that most great accomplishments were by white people. His "church" gives him a powerful marketing tool. "Religion is deeper than politics," he says. "Religion goes to the core of people's value system."



But don't confuse his religion with any in the mainstream: "Christianity is a big problem. It says 'God loves us all.' " After an unremarkable stint as a marginal figure in the hate movement, Hale today boasts followers in 40 states and 22 countries -- 30,000 total adherents, he claims. Civil rights groups put the number in the low thousands but say the group has targeted younger, more educated recruits, like Smith, who grew up in a wealthy suburb and got into a good college. After expressing regret that Smith was dead -- "and that other people are, too" -- Hale added: "But we can also reach people now through this unfortunate incident."



"The hate movement is more sophisticated today than two decades ago," says Brian Levin, a hate crimes expert at California State University-San Bernardino. "They want more upwardly mobile, young people who are computer literate and disenfranchised. Matt Hale is a microcosm of the future of this movement."



Hate-group explosion. The resurgence of the World Church of the Creator reflects an alarming trend in the shadowy world of right-wing extremists: The "Patriot," or militia, movement is declining, but the number of white supremacists is increasing. "Hate groups, neo-Nazi, and Klan groups have been rising markedly for two years," says Mark Potok, who tracks such groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "At the same time, weekend warriors who wanted to defend the Second Amendment have gotten sick of waiting for the revolution that never came." He points to more than 500 hate groups operating in the United States last year, notably the National Alliance, the Ku Klux Klan, and the National Socialist White People's Party. A neo-Nazi group, the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party, recently was given permission to march in downtown Washington, D.C., next month.



One reason the groups are rising: the Internet. At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, there was one Web site with a hate message, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In February, there were 1,400. Today, there are 2,000. The World Church of the Creator has a women's Web page featuring a diet and jewelry, and a kids' page offering crossword puzzles, comics, and coloring books. White-power music -- with unprintable lyrics -- also trumpets the message. Some 50,000 CDs by bands with gruesome names like White Terror, Aggravated Assault and Nordic Thunder are sold annually. These sorts of messages empower fearful, hate-filled people, like gun-toting Benjamin Smith, who once might have felt like part of society's margins but who suddenly feel part of a big movement.